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The cashier smiled as she scanned the pasta, the tomato sauce, the parmesan, the bottle of wine. Sherlock recognised that smile: she was making up a story about them in her mind, one in which John boiled pasta, tasted the sauce and asked Sherlock whether it needed more of something. Afterwards, he carried their plates of steaming noodles to the table and grated parmesan over them to finish. There would be a candle on the table, maybe. The lights would be dim; perhaps they'd put on a CD of something low and soft and romantic. They would eat dinner and then retire to bed and make love, slowly and tenderly, under the covers, and fall asleep wrapped in each other's arms.
Nothing of the sort would happen, of course. John would cook dinner whilst Sherlock did nothing, and then John would eat, alone at the table, maybe while reading a magazine. Sherlock would refuse because he was bored, and John would put the leftovers in the refrigerator. In the middle of the night, Sherlock would eat it straight from the container with loud sucking noises, the light from the refrigerator casting a dim blue-white light into the kitchen.
It was Sherlock who'd added the wine to the basket. If it'd been just the parsley and the sauce and the dried spaghetti, then it would've been ordinary. Just another weeknight dinner. But a bottle of cabernet made it romantic.
"Have a nice day," she chirped as she gave John his change. John gave her a harried, tight-lipped smile in reply, took the carrier bag, and strode away. Sherlock followed at a more leisurely pace, one hand in his pocket and the other thumbing over his phone.
"I think she fancied you," Sherlock offered, once he'd caught John up.
John's sigh was heavy and forceful. "No. No, she did not."
"She smiled at you."
"She smiled at us because she thought we were a couple," John said, with a little irritated twist to his neck. He spoke without looking at Sherlock, shoulders straight, strides long and regular. The carrier bag banged into his thigh once, twice.
"Oh." Sherlock feigned bemusement. "You could have corrected her."
John sighed less forcefully this time: less irritated, more resigned. "No, it would--there wouldn't have been any point."
"Ah." Sherlock let his lips curve into a small smile. John wasn't looking at him, anyway.
-----
It was selfish and horrible and inhuman of him, he knew, and pathetic and cowardly, besides. But it gave him such a feeling of satisfaction, whenever it happened. That feeling always vanished within seconds, as soon as they walked away from the well-meaning concierge or real estate agent or sales clerk, but as the hard little nugget of joy was the size and density of a popcorn kernel, Sherlock hardly felt its loss.
-----
"Heeeyy Jaaawwwwnn!"
"Hello, Harriet."
Her bellow cut off with a click of her throat. "You're not John."
"Very well observed," Sherlock agreed. He rearranged himself on the floor so that he was half under the coffee table, with his feet up on the couch cushions.
"Where's John?" Harry's voice turned menacing.
Sherlock smiled. "Occupied." John had just shut himself in the bathroom and turned on the water; he would be there for approximately another seven to nine minutes.
"If you did something to him..."
Sherlock surprised himself by laughing. Harriet Watson: what a surprise she was. Small and fierce, just like her brother. (Well, he didn't know for certain that she was short, but judging from John's height, shortness probably ran in their family.) "He's in the shower."
"Oh."
Sherlock waited as Harriet's thoughts percolated. He could almost hear them, bubbling and then dripping down, made slow and viscous by alcohol. Finally, she said, "Why'd you answer his phone?"
"Why not? He answers mine." Sometimes at Sherlock's behest, but just as often not. These days, it was John whose head would snap up at the little ping of Sherlock's phone, John who'd fumble for the little electronic device of plastic and silicon, John who'd snap, "Sherlock, it's a case! A triple murder in Rotherhithe! Are we on?" Sherlock's heart swelled at the thought, heavy and full in his chest.
"Oh." She went quiet for a little bit. "Ohhhh. Okay. Ooookay. Ssoooo. Then when'm I gonna meet you? John talks about you aaalll the time."
"Soon enough, I imagine." Sherlock didn't see why not. He and John had been flatmates and partners for a year now. He would cross paths with Harriet soon enough. "I'm very much looking forward to it." She would be a mine of information about John. Likely she had all kinds of embarrassing stories about their childhood exploits. John's ears would go red and he would grind his teeth as she recited them. Sherlock very much looked forward to that indeed.
"You know, you're not so bad," she said. "John makes it sound as if you're a complete ogre, so that I don't even know how he stands you. But you're all right, really."
"Happy to hear it," Sherlock said, and hung up on her.
-----
Sherlock usually sprawled out in the centre of his bed, but tonight he got in on the left side and paused. He rolled onto his belly, closed his eyes, and stretched his arm across the empty side.
How did it feel, to share the bed with another person? Didn't anyone ever become nervous about kicking the other person? Or of being kicked? What would it be like to have the warmth of another body under the sheets, someone else's feet pressed up against his? Sherlock opened his eyes and looked across at the other pillow. He tried to imagine another head there, the covers pulled up all the way to the ears, the hump of someone's shoulders underneath the duvet, the way the covers rose and fell with their breaths.
Something opened up in him, cavernous and painful. Sherlock kicked off the covers. He sat there for a moment at the edge of the bed, the cool air raising gooseflesh on his bare arms and legs, before getting up and trotting into the sitting room. He never had any of these problems on the couch.
-----
John's footfall up the seventeen steps were slow and measured: thoughtful, and perhaps slightly irritated or angry. Sherlock remained in his prone position on the couch, staring at the ceiling. John came in carrying his workbag, three newspapers tucked under his arm.
"I was just at the newsagent's," John reported, and tossed the newspapers onto Sherlock's chest. "Got those newspapers you wanted. The bloke asked me how my husband was doing."
"How strange," Sherlock drawled. He picked up the Telegraph and let the others drop to the floor in a flutter of newsprint.
A strange, twisted expression crossed John's face. "The man barely knows us! Why on Earth does he think we're married?"
"I haven't the faintest." Sherlock snapped open the paper and skimmed the headlines.
John shook his head and grumbled off to his room. Sherlock turned the page of his newspaper.
Last week, Sherlock had stopped to buy a newspaper, and when Mr. Khan had inquired after John, Sherlock had replied, "Oh, he's doing very well. I'll tell him you asked after him." Mr. Khan had smiled and waved, and Sherlock had tucked the newspaper under his arm and gone home.
-----
Sherlock returned from his little soujourn to the skip to find John holding two coffee cups and scowling. He handed Sherlock his cup in its little paper sleeve, with a squiggle scrawled on the side that only resembled the name "Sherlock" in its large, exaggerated S and a little spike of a k at the end.
"What?" Sherlock queried.
"Nothing," John muttered. "Did you find anything?"
Sherlock shook his head, and they left the coffeeshop. Sherlock took a sip of his coffee. Their breaths frosted in the crisp air, and John took a moment to tug up the collar of his jacket against the cold.
"You were gone for a bit," John said, "and she called my coffee. Yours had been sitting there for a while, and when I went to get mine, she said, 'I think this is your boyfriend's.'"
"Ah," said Sherlock. He'd been at the skip for longer than was necessary, perhaps, but he'd wanted to be thorough.
John blew out a mournful breath between his lips. "I was going to get her number, too."
"You could have corrected her."
John shook his head and looked down at the ground. "No, it wouldn't have--never mind."
-----
He knew, of course, that this would never last. John Watson was kind, compassionate, loyal, strong, and intelligent (relatively speaking, of course), and eventually someone would notice. They would say to him, "John, why don't you leave your mad flatmate who keeps toes in the crisper and sabres under the couch and who daily imperils your life, and come with me. We'll have two angelic-faced children, and a dog, and you'll work in a surgery or perhaps start your own practice, and no one will torture you with violin music at 3 in the morning and you'll not have to sleep with a gun under your pillow." And John would smile, and nod, and leave.
And Sherlock--the kindest thing he could do for John, then, would be to let him go, and say nothing.
-----
John stomped slowly up the stairs. "Well," he sighed, pausing to shrug off his jacket and hang it on its hook, "that was a wash."
Sherlock, who was lying on the couch, did not dignify John's statement with a query, though it clearly begged for one. John had come to expect this over the months of their partnership and prattled on as if Sherlock had just politely inquired what, exactly, what such a wash. "I was chatting up this woman at the pub. Doing really well, I thought. She recognised me from the papers, John Watson, Sherlock Holmes' blogger." It was miserably cold outside, and drizzly; John would want something hot to warm him up. Ah, yes: there were the sounds of kettle-filling now.
"She was really into it, into me, asking me about the cases and whether or not it was all true and what have you, and I thought, oh, this is really going somewhere. So then I asked if she'd like to have dinner sometime, and suddenly she stops and gives me this look, and she asks, what, like a date?" Sherlock turned his head and saw John leaning against the frame of the entryway to the kitchen, arms crossed, looking at Sherlock. "And I said yes, it'd be a date, and she said, oh, but I thought you and Sherlock..." John heaved another sigh and bowed his head.
"Ah," said Sherlock.
"I can't do this," John said to the floor. He brought up one hand to scrub at the back of his head. "I'm never going to get off at this rate. Not if everyone thinks we're a bloody couple!"
Sherlock remembered what he'd overheard, what Irene Adler had said: Yes, you are. He felt as if a dried pea had lodged in his chest. He relaxed his face and kept it neutral. "You could have corrected her."
"I did," John mumbled. "I told her it wasn't like that, but it wasn't, I could tell she wasn't." The kettle clicked. John turned and went back into the kitchen, and Sherlock heard the fumbling of cabinets, the getting down of tea and a mug. He turned so that he faced the back of the couch and exhaled.
---end?---